Development in DC is never threatened

Harry Jaffe, the co-author of the book Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C., is a columnist for the Examiner. His writings generally, but more lately, in today's "Mayor’s strife with council threatens D.C. development," and the previous column "Redevelopment trumps school reform as top issue," seem to express surprise that development is the number one issue in DC, and that somehow development is "threatened" because of strife between the DC Council and the Executive Branch.

It's as if he never read his own book.

Chapter 4 specifically is about the development regime and agenda under Mayor Barry. (In a blog comment, Reid suggests that perhaps it is likely, and I agree, that co-author Tom Sherwood wrote the sections on how the government worked under the Barry Administration. So maybe Jaffe doesn't really know how the city works.)

-- Book review of Dream City in the Washington Monthly

But the reality is that this way of dealing is nothing unique to the mayoral administration of that period.

After reading the journal article, "The City as a Growth Machine," and later the book that grew out of the paper, Urban Fortunes: Toward a Political Economy of Place, it seemed to me that Dream City could be thought of as one of the many case studies (books, papers, monographs) that have been written exploring the "growth machine" thesis--even though the authors are journalists, not academics.

Abstract from the Growth Machine paper:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. Governmental authority, at the local and nonlocal levels, is utilized to assist in achieving this growth at the expense of competing localities. Conditions of community life are largely a consequence of the social, economic, and political forces embodied in this growth machine.

Development will happen. The executive branch will deal everything away that the developers want. And for the most part, Council will accede to this.

Why should it be any different under Mayor Fenty compared to under Mayor Barry or Mayor Williams.

I wish that instead Mr. Jaffe would write more about why so many of the projects yield so little, are inner focused, and fail to contribute to urban design nor extend the livability of the city.

How the Growth Machine works

Where growth machine theory is a little weak is in describing how the coalition works. That's where urban regime theory, from the field of political science, is more helpful. Political scientist Clarence Stone, a professor at University of Maryland is the dean of the urban regime "school."

I don't think these theories are competing so much as they are reciprocal--different sides of the same coin. "Growth Machine" theory explains the motivation of "the land-based elite," and "urban regime" theory explains in detail how the land-based elite operates and functions.

A couple years ago, Professor Stone was kind enough to send me a recent paper, "Now What? The continuing evolution of Urban Regime analysis." He writes:

An urban regime can be preliminarily defined as the informal arrangements through which a locality is governed (Stone 1989). Because governance is about sustained efforts, it is important to think in agenda terms rather than about stand-alone issues. By agenda I mean the set of challenges which policy makers accord priority. A concern with agendas takes us away from focusing on short-term controversies and instead directs attention to continuing efforts and the level of weight they carry in the political life of a community. Rather than treating issues as if they are disconnected, a governance perspective calls for considering how any given issue fits into a flow of decisions and actions. This approach enlarges the scope of what is being analyzed, looking at the forest not a particular tree here or there. (emphasis added, in this paragraph and below)

In discussing Atlanta, Stone writes: "Land use, transportation, and housing formed an interrelated agenda that the city's major economic interests were keen to advance;" and

By looking closely at the policy role of business leaders and how their position in the civic structure of a community enabled that role, he identified connections between Atlanta's governing coalition and the resources it brought to bear, and on to the scheme of cooperation that made this informal system work. In his own way, Hunter had identified the key elements in an urban regime – governing coalition, agenda, resources, and mode of cooperation. These elements could be brought into the next debate about analyzing local politics, a debate about structural determinism.

In DC, the governing coalition is the Federal City Council and the related interests (such as the property owner members of the Downtown BID). They set the development and political agenda of the city.

The schools reform effort is a classic example. Chancellor Rhee reports to the Federal City Council before she talks to Mayor Fenty...

--Following the Money: All Roads Lead to the Federal City Council a blog entry from State of Columbia about the schools issue
-- THE DISTRICT'S POWER BEHIND THE SCENES/Washington Post-connected business group wields influence over city's legislative agenda, the award-winning article about the Federal City Council from the no-longer-published Common Denominator.